#8
book : Emma Donoghue | Room
song : Lykke Li | Time Flies
This is probably the most daunting book-song combination I’m ever going to write in #30hari30buku30lagu. Originally I intended to write about this book later, maybe for #15 or #20. When I started to read it 2 days ago, I was immediately attached to the book and was determined to write about it last night. I always play some songs to accompany me reading books, and at the end of this book I heard Lykke Li’s ominous voice—but then I fell asleep right after I finished it.
I had a strange dream from my encounter with Room. A dream—almost like a visualization of the story, if I may presume—where there’s a shadow of a boy loitering in the bushes, in a room. His mother came and laying him bare under the fluorescent light while murmuring:
“My back against yours, sweetheart. Although we’re looking straight ahead, the gaze from our eyes shall meet halfway around our worlds.”
The story is uttered to you through Jack, a 5 year-old boy who just had his birthday and have been living his short life span with Ma. All he knows is that the world’s never beyond those four walls; that the sphere consists of his Ma, five illustrated books and songs Ma always read and sing over and over and over and over. This tiny space is everything for him, but a penitentiary for Ma. As if it was not tiny enough, they have a nighttime visitor named Old Nick. I don’t even dare to envision living within closure as much, not to mention growing a child and keeping him amused with what this Room can give. Old Nick’s lurking in a Wardrobe when Jack found him. Fawn on Jack, Old Nick is the only companion visible in his eyes. To Jack who knows nothing else than his 3 meters peripheral world, the life is perfect. But for Ma, this captivity is a purgatory—yet she has no choice. Two contrastive worlds, two disparate minds, two distinct ways of looking at life.. collide. Jack finds out the true world outside his Room. The shrill presentiment of unknown dread creeping to his head, the life he’s known before—although huddled by rigid walls—was probably the best state for him.
Ma is an example of a maternal figure who’d do beyond sanity for her child. We learn everything about her through Jack’s voice and having a child to narrate the story was a genius idea. But to some, this book might generate unnerving images in mind’s eye as what happened to me when the story of Elizabeth Fritzi popped into my head. This 300+ pages book that I’ve swallowed within 2 days might give you the exact effect.
From its first paragraph:
“Today I’m 5. I was 4 last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I’m changed to 5.. abracadabra! Before that I was three, then 2, then 1, then 0.. Was I minus numbers?”
…I was held in captive.
time will fly.. upon my baby’s back.
time will fly.. upon my baby’s back.
#30hari30buku30lagu
